About

Hi, my name is Vu Nguyen. I am a designer and devel­oper spe­cial­iz­ing in user inter­faces and inter­ac­tion design.

Past

I was born in Vietnam in 1983 and a year later my father went to work in Bulgaria, a small coun­try in Eastern Europe. I had been trav­el­ing back and forth between Vietnam and Bulgaria for 11 years when my fam­ily moved per­ma­nently to Sofia, the cap­i­tal city of Bulgaria. During that time I had a chance to visit a few coun­tries includ­ing Germany, Hungary and Russia. I came to the US in 2002 and grad­u­ated from UNC-Chapel Hill major­ing in visual com­mu­ni­ca­tion in 2006. After school, I got offered a job as a graph­ics edi­tor at The New York Times, where I stayed until 2008 and left to work for msnbc.com.

Present

I now live in Seattle and work as an inter­ac­tive edi­tor at msnbc.com. I pro­duce inter­ac­tive graph­ics and mul­ti­me­dia fea­tures for the site. I am also a free­lance graph­ics designer. While not work­ing, I try to explore the areas around my new home in Seattle. This blog is a venue for me to show­case my works and express my thoughts on design and the web.

2010 — Best in busi­ness from Society of American Business Editors and Writers for Adveristy Index Map.

2009 – Climbing Kilimanjaro was cho­sen to be part of the Design USA exhi­bi­tion at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

2007 — Gold from mal­ofiej 16 for Climbing Kilimanjaro

2007 — Gold from Society of News Design for Climbing Kilimanjaro

2007 — Best of Category: Interactive/Digital award in the 2007 CaGIS/ACSM Map Design Competition for Climbing Kilimanjaro

2007 — Awards of Excellence from Society of News Design for Endorsements of all shapes and sizes

2007 — Awards of Excellence from Society of News Design for Election ’08 Campaign Finance

2006 — Mildred Gifford Scholarship

2006 — Documentary Multimedia Scholarship

2005 — Quincy Sharpe Mills Scholarship